With rapid development of the electronic industry, performance requirements and structural strength requirements on electronic products are increasingly high. To ensure that an electrical connector in an electronic product can be firmly soldered to a circuit board, a frequently used practice in the industry is to enhance a soldering effect by solder balls. A conventional electrical connector includes an insulating body provided with multiple terminal slots, and multiple terminals fixedly disposed in the multiple terminal slots. One end of each terminal has an elastic contact portion protruding from a top surface of the insulating body to be in contact with a chip module, and the other end has a soldering portion soldered to a circuit board. Multiple solder balls are partially disposed in the multiple terminal slots, and each solder ball is clamped and fixed by both a side wall of the corresponding terminal slot and the soldering portion or is clamped and fixed only in dependence on the corresponding soldering portion itself, so that the solder ball can be fixed to the insulating body, and be in contact with the soldering portion. Therefore, the terminals may be soldered to the circuit board.
However, if each solder ball is clamped and fixed in dependence on both the side wall of the terminal slot and the soldering portion, that is, each solder ball resists the side wall of the terminal slot, when the electrical connector is soldered to the circuit board, heating processing needs to be performed on the solder balls. In this way, the solder balls are heated and swelled to extrude the terminal slots, so that the insulating body is deformed, or even warped. It is easy for the solder balls to drop, so that the soldering portions and the circuit board generate an empty solder, and moreover, it is easy to affect electrical contact between the elastic contact portion and the chip module, so that electrical connection performance of the electrical connector is poor. If each solder ball is clamped and fixed only in dependence on the soldering portion itself, the solder ball can be clamped only after the soldering portion is designed into a relatively complex structure. In this way, costs are relatively high. Moreover, each terminal is formed by punching or bending a metal plate material, and therefore the thickness of the terminal is relatively thin. A clamping force of the soldering portion is relatively weak, so that when the electrical connector is in a movement or transportation process, it is easy for the solder ball to drop, causing undesired soldering between the soldering portions and the circuit board.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need to design a novel method for manufacturing an electrical connector exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.